Michael Crowley quotes a pro-Obama Democratic foreign policy staffer:

With General Jim Jones looking a strong bet for National Security Advisor, Hillary Clinton slated for State, and Bob Gates staying on at DOD, it appears increasingly likely that the three senior foreign policy positions in the Obama Administration will be filled by people who were not active Obama supporters during the campaign. Moreover, these principals are likely to bring their own hanger-ons – Hillary alone is likely to absorb into State the foreign policy advisors from her primary campaign, not necessarily their Obama counterparts.

So how do you think that makes the “Gang of 300” who staffed Candidate Obama on foreign policy issues, wrote white papers, served as surrogates for him, etc. during the long campaign feel?

Well, they probably feel like chumps. What surprises me about the Jones pick is that it takes away a slot that seemed as if it would be the obvious job for Susan Rice, who was one of the earliest and most prominent of Obama’s advisors. An important thing to remember about most of those 300 is that a lot of them were lower-level people during the Clinton administration, and so in this sense were also holdovers from that era, but among them were not any of the high-profile people who were closely tied to the Clintons and who genuinely represented a more hawkish Old Guard. Now Clinton herself returns with her entire entourage, and the people who risked being shut out all together in the event that Hillary had won the nomination are not repaid with much of anything. It seems to me that at some point this pattern of forgetting about the people who helped get him where he is, which Obama has tended to do quite a few times over the years, will blow up in his face.

P.S. The greater significance of this is that it means that the conduct of foreign policy in the Obama administration at a high level will probably not include most of the people who advised Obama during the campaign. This was the time when he laid out the foreign policy differences with Clinton that his supporters hang so many hopes on, and these were the people who helped formulate and defend those differences, while their counterparts did their best to frame some of Obama’s main positions as reckless and naive.